


The Short Unhappy Life of Harry Watson

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [12]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 08:32:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10081541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: I’m going to talk a little bit about “The Final Problem” and the vanishing of Harry Watson, the original Secret Sister.





	

##  [The Short Unhappy Life of Harry Watson](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/155997962139/the-short-unhappy-life-of-harry-watson)

 

[This is the final instalment of the Wild About Harry Series.](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F9368615&t=OWZjNTQ0ZDQyNTUwNGZjZmViYTdhYjMyMTMyY2Y0MThlODZkNjBkMSxmMkRKb2pYZQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=http%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F155997962139%2Fthe-short-unhappy-life-of-harry-watson&m=1)

I said it was going to be 1000 words of Harry chasing Eurus with a chainsaw. In fact it’s 1700 words, which is some kind of shortness record for me, and it’s mostly just sad. 

I think my experience with writing that series, while possibly unique to myself, was not unlike the experience a lot of Sherlock fans had: as the show barreled through the first two seasons, it scattered little bits and pieces that were so intriguing and so exciting that we picked them up and took them home and reconstructed, the way the paleontologists have to reconstruct a dinosaur from an ankle bone, a whole and coherent story from which that brilliant fragment might have come. 

I’m going to talk a little bit about “The Final Problem” and the vanishing of Harry Watson, the original Secret Sister.

According to Moffat, Eurus’s storyline developed from one of these throwaway bits, a line of dialogue they decided not to use early on about how Sherlock’s brother was smarter than him but their SISTER, look out. 

They decided, in “A Study in Pink,” to relocate the brother/sister joke to make it the punch line of Sherlock’s reading of John’s phone, which is an updating of Holmes’s reading of Watson’s pocketwatch in _The Sign of Four._ Here’s some of the original passage from _Sign_ :

**I handed him over the watch with some slight feeling of amusement in my heart, for the test was, as I thought, an impossible one, and I intended it as a lesson against the somewhat dogmatic tone which he occasionally assumed. He balanced the watch in his hand, gazed hard at the dial, opened the back, and examined the works, first with his naked eyes and then with a powerful convex lens. I could hardly keep from smiling at his crestfallen face when he finally snapped the case to and handed it back.**

**“There are hardly any data,” he remarked. “The watch has been recently cleaned, which robs me of my most suggestive facts.”**

**“You are right,” I answered. “It was cleaned before being sent to me.” In my heart I accused my companion of putting forward a most lame and impotent excuse to cover his failure. What data could he expect from an uncleaned watch?**

**“Though unsatisfactory, my research has not been entirely barren,” he observed, staring up at the ceiling with dreamy, lack-lustre eyes. “Subject to your correction, I should judge that the watch belonged to your elder brother, who inherited it from your father.”**

**“That you gather, no doubt, from the H. W. upon the back?”**

**“Quite so. The W. suggests your own name. The date of the watch is nearly fifty years back, and the initials are as old as the watch: so it was made for the last generation. Jewelry usually descends to the eldest son, and he is most likely to have the same name as the father. Your father has, if I remember right, been dead many years. It has, therefore, been in the hands of your eldest brother.”**

**“Right, so far,” said I. “Anything else?”**

**“He was a man of untidy habits,—very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.”**

**I sprang from my chair and limped impatiently about the room with considerable bitterness in my heart.**

**“This is unworthy of you, Holmes,” I said. “I could not have believed that you would have descended to this. You have made inquires into the history of my unhappy brother, and you now pretend to deduce this knowledge in some fanciful way. You cannot expect me to believe that you have read all this from his old watch! It is unkind, and, to speak plainly, has a touch of charlatanism in it.”**

**“My dear doctor,” said he, kindly, “pray accept my apologies. Viewing the matter as an abstract problem, I had forgotten how personal and painful a thing it might be to you. I assure you, however, that I never even knew that you had a brother until you handed me the watch.”**

I’ve always really liked this passage. The deduction work itself is virtuosic, of course; but more than that, it shows you Holmes and Watson in the midst of developing their friendship. Holmes recognizes that he’s screwed up by forgetting, in his preoccupation with the “abstract problem,” that the history he’s seeing in this watch is no doubt extremely painful for Watson. We might think of this as a classic ‘reasoning machine’ moment. But actually, this whole exchange shows how attuned Holmes is to Watson’s moods. He treats it as an abstract problem because Watson is offering it to him as an abstract problem. When Watson’s handing over the watch, he’s only thinking about how much fun it’s going to be to lord it over Holmes for once, and that’s what Holmes picks up on. It’s not until after Holmes unearths the tragic backstory that Watson starts to feel the “bitterness” that this story holds for him. Even in his outburst, Watson never actually says, “Can’t you see that remembering my brother’s decline and death upsets me?” All the language about this being “unkind” and “descending to this” and it being “unworthy” of him, is–on the surface–referring to Watson’s accusation that Holmes is only “pretending” to deduce all of this. But when Holmes responds, he responds to what he’s figured out is the **real** source of Watson’s hurt: the long and painful loss of his (apparently) only sibling to alcoholism. When you consider that this exchange happens as part of the longest conversation he and Watson ever have about Holmes’s drug use, it really tells you how much more Holmes knows about Watson’s emotions than Watson knows about them. Watson thinks he’s chosen this object at random to teach Holmes a “lesson” about humility. In fact, the “lesson” he’s subconsciously imparting by handing Holmes the watch at this moment is “if you keep shooting up you will end up like my brother.” So take a moment to impress yourself with the implications of the fact that instead of immediately defending himself against the accusation of being a fraud, Holmes responds to the real emotion underneath that by acknowledging the grief and pain Watson still feels over his brother.

H. Watson is never referred to again, that I can remember, in ACD canon. Well, he was dead; and ACD couldn’t always remember Watson’s first name, never mind his family arrangements. The watch deduction is a classic bit and reappears in the Robert Downey _Sherlock Holmes,_ although there the watch belongs to someone else. I was much more fascinated by what they did with it in “A Study in Pink.” First, the choice to update the pocket watch to a phone was perfect: a utilitarian but highly personalized item, an expensive item that people treat carelessly, and actually the phone is in fact what we use now instead of a watch to tell time. They managed to get in all the deductions, with some modifications; and then, in what I thought at the time was a sweet little updating move, they exposed Sherlock’s reliance on the “balance of probability” by having “Harry” turn out to be a sister instead of a brother. In the process of setting this joke up, they incidentally gave John a queer butch sister.

I thought this was fascinating. You’d think it would have had some impact on John that his older sister, in addition to being an alcoholic, was in a long-term relationship with a woman and must be, to some extent, gender non-conforming. If nothing else you’d think it would prepare him to accept friendship with someone as beyond the mainstream as Sherlock Holmes. You’d think his history of dealing with Harry’s alcoholism would have an effect on how he handles Sherlock’s drug use. You’d think a lot of things about how this might be part of who John Watson is; and in the first season, it seemed as if someone other than me might have been thinking about them. Harry is referred to again in “Scandal in Bohemia,” when John goes to stay with her for Christmas. After that she’s never referenced again until “The Sign of Three,” when John tells Mary that Harry hasn’t come to the wedding. (Dozens of other people have, despite the fact that most of the time it appears that John and Mary have no friends outside the Sherlock inner circle.) 

After that, it appears that Moffat and Gatiss simply forgot they ever invented her, despite the fact that the “not a brother, a sister” joke resurfaces again in malignant form in Eurus. Now, this can be attributed in part to an amazing lack of interest, on the part of the showrunners and writers, in John’s family. We don’t know who his parents are or how and why they died, for instance, and he never ever talks about them. So maybe that’s the only reason why, during all this craziness, neither John nor anyone else ever brings up his own estranged sister. But it seems to me more as if to them, Harry was never Harry but a gimmick which they used once, then pulled out of its niche to recycle and use again. In the bizarre conversation that Sherlock and Eurus have about sex, for instance, which serves no real purpose other than to make Eurus even stranger and more dangerous than she already seems, she implies that her first sexual partner/victim was a woman (before she says she didn’t know or care what gender she was). This makes Eurus the third woman in the _Sherlock_ universe who is explicitly or implicitly identified as lesbian and (since the first two are Harry and Irene) potentially masculinized (Harry’s name, Irene’s dominance, Eurus’s violence and love for gunplay). And she’s also the third queer woman whose masculinity the show resolutely fails to visualize. Harry is invisible; Irene is femmy in appearance and often naked; Eurus spends most of her episode in long flowing curly hair and a white nightgown.

So what I feel, whether or not this is what actually happened, is that Harry was introduced, submerged, and then dredged back up in this hideous and monstrous form as Sherlock’s insane female doppelganger. And…that’s very disappointing. Very, very, very disappointing.

I don’t think I’m going to write her any more. I think the show has basically resolved my ambivalence about it. I’ll always be part of the fandom. But I can’t invest the time and the energy in it that I used to. Eventually you get tired of doing the work the show should be doing, and you decide to put that energy to better use.

I want to thank everyone who read the Harry stories. They were never that popular, but the enthusiasm the happy few fans always had for them always really cheered me up. I’m glad I created her. She’ll be in the Valhalla of the mind with them now, for me, where there will be no more batshit crazy Moffat plots, and it’s always 2010.


End file.
